Park Row

1952 US Samuel Fuller
✰✰✰

Sam Fuller's [sincere] love letter to the ideals of a young American newspaper-business unfolds like a dime-bag version of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane—complete with a Declaration of Principles and a dose of wickedly-good images: tracking across the film's lone set, a reconstructed Park Row; closing in on characters, turning office balusters into jail bars; squeezing as much out of a buck as possible. Gene Evans plays Phineas Mitchell, a good reporter treated badly by his employer; he quits, then sets up his own rival press. Ex-boss now-enemy Charity Hackett, played fiendish dominatrix by Mary Welch, poses business and romantic problems, slithering, dazzling in her only film role. Let me tell ya: it's a powder-keg of an 83-minutes, without much let-up. And though it gets a tad sentimental, with too many speeches, we must remember that this is Fuller. If ever a filmmaker deserved to get a bit doe-eyed and romantic...

Merrill's Marauders

1962 US Samuel Fuller
✰✰ 1/2

Samuel Fuller's war films are all worth watching, but this one won't top any lists. It's about a stubborn, courageous U.S. Army commander who leads his men on a bushwhack through WWII-era Burma, cleaning out the Japanese. There are a lot of characters, not a lot of time to get to know them. War is shown as exhaustion, the winner being the one able to stretch himself the thinnest without snapping. Action itself is thick, 95 minutes without relaxation. One of the best sequences (there are several amazing ones) shows the effects of war by showing a handful of spots twice: once clean, before combat; once after, with bodies and destruction strewn all around. Interactions between foreign soldiers and native villagers are touching. Unfortunately, these highlights occur on an ordinary backdrop: film is workmanlike, for the most part. Fuller's toughness is here, but not quite his talent, his heart. Still, it's interesting to consider '62 and think of the film as sensing Vietnam.